InstantDB: A Modern Firebase

You write your frontend, and we handle the rest

The best apps today have a common feature set. Every interaction happens instantly, you rarely see loading screens, collaboration is easy and delightful, and the app still works when offline.

But building them is a schlep: spin up servers, auth, permissions, endpoints, sockets, then shuffle data, handle optimistic updates, and deal with rollbacks.

Instant solves these problems for you by giving you a database you can subscribe to directly in the browser. You write relational queries in your app, and we handle the rest.

Want to try it yourself? Build a live app in less than 5 minutes.

import { init, tx, id } from "@instantdb/react";

const db = init({
  appId: process.env.NEXT_PUBLIC_APP_ID,
});

function Chat() {
  // 1. Read
  const { isLoading, error, data } = db.useQuery({
    messages: {},
  });

  // 2. Write
  const addMessage = (message) => {
    db.transact(tx.messages[id()].update(message));
  };

  // 3. Render!
  return <UI data={data} onAdd={addMessage} />;
}

Instant Updates

When apps are at their best, every change a user make should reflect instantly. There should be few spinners, loading states, or refresh buttons.

To do this today, you write custom code for endpoints, logic to apply optimistic updates, and to handle rollbacks.

Databases already know how to apply changes and handle rollbacks. With Instant, you write `transact`, and optimistic updates are handled for you.

Multiplayer

Users seek collaborative experiences and sync across devices. To get this right, you need to set up sockets, cache and invalidate queries, and set up permission filters.

Instant takes inspiration from systems like Figma’s LiveGraph and Linear’s sync. We built the infrastructure that listens to transactions, and updates relevant queries.

See the code

Offline Mode

Users want your app to work even when they're offline. Not only does this make your app available everywhere, it makes your app feel faster. The first time your app loads, users see a loading screen. Every load afterwards gets satisfied by the local cache.

To support this, you need a way to apply changes locally, persist to disk, and reconcile when users come back online.

Instant comes with this logic baked in: the local database knows what is committed to the server and what is pending. No need to deal with queues.

Sync Off

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About the team

Instant is built by senior and staff engineers from Facebook and Airbnb. We spent multiple years thinking deeply about this problem and have built a product that we believe is the future of application development.

We're backed by YCombinator, SV Angel, and top investors like:

James Tamplin

CEO of Firebase

Paul Graham

Co-Founder of YCombinator

Karri Saarinen

CEO of Linear

Amjad Masad

CEO of Replit

Zach Sims

CEO of Codecademy

Greg Brockman

Co-Founder of OpenAI

Jeff Dean

Chief Scientist of Google DeepMind

And 50+ technical founders

Sendbird, Panther, Segment and more

Check out our essay below to learn more why we think Instant is solving one of the largest problems in frontend development today.

Get StartedRead Essay